The Game
by Chicleeblair
Summary: She tells him a secret in the darkness, and he realizes that each time his heart breaks for her, he loves her more. Mer/Der


"Did you ever play the game?" she murmurs against his shoulder as they lie in the darkness that can come only after a day that ends at midnight.

"I think I just lost it," he points out, smoothing a lock of her golden hair away from her face.

"Oh, not the 'if you think about it, you lose it' game. I suck at that," she admits with a small giggle. She's always giggling now, and he loves it. "No… I just… remembered. Which, you'd think I would have remembered it earlier, what with George and all."

"Remembered what?" he breaks in gently, because it is late, and he does want to sleep. He also knows that so does she, and she wouldn't have brought this up if she did not think he needed to hear it. Needed to understand her.

She swallows, and since his eyes are almost useless in the dark, the sound is magnified. "When I was a kid… well, a teenager… I couldn't sleep. I would lie awake, and pretend I wasn't waiting for the sound of my mother coming home. And, I read somewhere that listing things was a good way to fall asleep. So child of darkness that I was… I used to… it sounds more morbid than it is, but… I used to think: if I died, who would come to my funeral."

His throat clenches. "Mer--."

"Shh," she murmurs, and shouldn't he be the reassuring one tonight? "Let me talk, okay? I would lie there, listening to Boston traffic, and think: if I were in one of those cars, and it crashed, who would come? There was my eighth grade English teacher, Mrs. Snyder. She liked me. Always said I had spirit. That was before the pink hair…. And, I figured my classmates might be required to go, but probably half of them would use getting out of school as a chance to ditch and go smoke and drink in the abandon lot, like we did.

"My mother's scrub nurses, maybe, out of some sense of duty. And I always wondered if maybe it would make my father come back and think about how he was too late. I didn't hold out much hope for that. My aunt, maybe, if her hatred of my mom didn't show through. And my mother… well… I wasn't sure. It wasn't because I didn't think she loved me. In some warped way, I always knew she did. But, I figured she would probably bury herself in her work, and try to forget that she ever had a daughter. Particularly one that failed her in the worst way possible, by dying before she could be whatever it was she wanted me to be.

"When I got older, and played the game, there were even less people. My mom's family hadn't contacted us in years, and Sadie was more likely to be in a coffin next to me. I mean, it's kind of a wonder we never did get grievously injured with some of the stuff we pulled."

"Die and Death," he murmured against the curve of her collarbone.

"Right," she agreed. "But, Derek, here's the thing, and here's why I'm telling you this and not hiding it in the land of Dark and Twisty Meredith. Because if I had died, or if I died now, there would be so many people there for me, actually sad, that the part of me that is still sixteen years old and friendless cannot believe it. And that's amazing, but the thing is… the thing is, now I don't have to play the game to know that people care about me. I see it every day. So, I thought you should know that. Because, I love you, and I can sleep now, thanks to you. And I don't have to play dark and twisty games like that to feel like I matter to someone in the world."

There is silence for a minute, the silence that always comes when he is making sure that she is finished with a monologue. In that second he thinks about himself at sixteen. Had he been asked about his own funeral, he would have had a list to rattle off without a second thought, but it would have also never come up. He couldn't imagine how the girl that was his wife must have felt, lying alone in the dark. It was a marker of how far she had come.

He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "For the record," he says, wrapping his arms all the way around her thin frame, "I wouldn't be there." Her breath catches. "I'd be the one in the coffin next to you. I can't live without you, Meredith Grey."

She burrows her face into his shirt, and doesn't say anything. She doesn't have to. They both know what the other feels now. The mystery that kept them apart for so long has been solved, and it is nights like this that prove it to him. "I love you," he whispers, into the darkness. "Think about that."

"A lot of people love me," she murmurs, her voice now cloudy with sleep. "That's a good list."

He agrees.


End file.
